12 Years a Slave Themes

12 Years a Slave Assignment The pain and abuse experienced by Solomon Northrup in his 12 years of slavery, like the millions of other slaves who were kidnapped in Africa and sold across the U.S., is a tragic example of the pain one society can inflict upon another group of people. The movie 12 Years A Slave graphically portrays the horrors of slavery in America, and demonstrates the shame of the system, using the incredible irony in the story of Solomon Northrup. Since he had a dpcument that said he was a free black man, he was treated by others as a fellow man, but after he was kidnapped he was considered property, like an animal. There was no change in Solomon himself as a person; only a corrupt system declared that he could now be owned as nothing said otherwise. Only a paper could take away your humanity. Additionally, the slave masters and traders, including Solomon Northrup’s, felt that they did not just have the right to treat their slaves however they liked, they also claimed they had the right to, even more simply, own their fellow man. And by decree of the American government, they were fully at liberty to do so. Both examples point to a major theme of the movie, and applies to the slavery system that was in existence all over the Western world: dehumanization. The black slaves who were abused and exploited by the American policy of slavery had their humanity stripped away from them, and were considered the same as any other property of the owner. In contrast, the slave owners who considered fellow humans their own property and whom they could abuse at their leisure had their ideas of justice led so astray by the permitting of slavery that they seemed to lack basic human qualities themselves, including compassion and a sense of reason. The plight of the slaves is summed up perfectly when a fellow slave tells Solomon Northrup, after throwing the body of another slave into the ocean, that “he was better off dead”. It is quite astounding that